Cosmic Horror and SIGNALIS: What is True Madness, and How to Properly Visualize It

By Robert Sheeran

(Spoilers for SIGNALIS)

CW: Gore, suicide, death, violence, loss of reality, general warnings

Horror games generally have several ways to make their game scary. Many games achieve this with simple jump scares. Some have you fight disturbing, creepy monsters. Some simply have an unsettling atmosphere, the environment giving off a sort of feeling that you’re both alone, yet not. Others still make you question your sanity, an unreliable narrator. SIGNALIS employs all these techniques and more, all carefully crafted to create a horror experience that speaks to everyone’s preferences. Or to be more precise, it combines almost every horror experience into a game so that the most amount of people would be frightened, allowing for a unique perspective on the idea of what madness is.

Some have described madness as doing something over and over and over, while expecting different results. Others have described it as witnessing a fleeting glimpse of the true nature of the universe, only to have that glimpse ripped away and to be left in the dark, grasping at that hazy memory in agony. Others still see it as an attempt to escape this cruel world that traps them, one way or another. SIGNALIS sees madness as all these explanations at once. Everyone in SIGNALIS is trapped, in one shape or another, even the player, and all characters attempt to escape, unsuccessfully, or only to find themselves in a different trap.

To give some context, SIGNALIS is a 2022 single-player survival horror game created by Yuri Stern, developed by Rose Engine, and published by Humble Games and Playism. The gameplay involves controlling the protagonist, Elster, with a fixed camera isometric third-person perspective. You explore a (seemingly) abandoned government facility, fighting through waves of enemies, solving various puzzles, exploring the environment, and reading various documents that help enhance the lore and give context to the story. Resources are scarce, and the player is given multiple options when encountering enemies, such as expending ammo, or slowly and quietly sneaking past them to save ammunition.

Ariane, the lover of the protagonist Elster, is raised by her mother at a radio tower on a distant, isolated planet until she is sent to school on a more populated planet. There, she is relentlessly bullied and isolated, until she signs up for the Penrose program and is sent into space for 3000 cycles (days), searching for habitable planets. She is trapped on this tiny ship for over eight years with only a Replika (android) for company. When the life support systems fail after 3000 days, she becomes sick and is forced into hibernation, begging Elster to end her life should she wake up from the chaining sleep. Elster is then trapped in a vicious cycle of horror and death upon crash landing on Serpinski a far distant mining planet, fighting off corrupted Replikas and failing to fulfill her promise to Ariane time and time again, never able to escape. The person blocking her from breaking the cycle and freeing herself and Ariane, is Falke, the commander Replika of Serpinski, who has also been corrupted and, in multiple diary entries, claims to have witnessed something incredible, but disturbing. Something that changed everything.

The thing she saw corrupted her, corrupted the entire world, bringing everyone together to experience her insanity. This game revolves around different kinds of madness, and it visualizes it in such a way to make it stand out from other, similar games in the survival horror genre.

To start, the main enemies encountered during this game are corrupted Replikas such as the player, twisted and grotesque beings now stumbling around in flickering hallways. Only embers of their original personalities remain, the rest consumed with screams and sobs.

Each enemy requires different techniques or weapons to take down. Note the difference between killing and taking down. Most enemies will fall to the floor after taking enough damage, but there is a likely chance they will stand back up to swarm the player once more. Only burning the bodies ensures their permanent deaths, but flares are extremely rare, and so must be reserved for more difficult enemies. Knowing every enemy defeated will rise again gives the player a unique sense of paranoia, dreading returning to areas filled with bloody, malformed corpses. That fear of encountering those insane Replikas once more actually plays in part with the protagonist, Elster. These mad enemies reflect on the madness of Elster, since normal people don’t witness deformed, fleshy monsters attacking them constantly.

In the title card, snippets of Elster’s skin falling away to reveal the dark mechanical side of her flash on screen for brief moments.

Elster herself is quite likely mad but her madness is more subtle than the screaming monsters attacking her. In fact, throughout the game, only two other beings are mostly coherent, one of which is Adler, a Replika who assisted the commander of Serpinski. Adler can be considered the antagonist of the game at first, since after encountering him for the first time, he pushes Elster down an elevator shaft onto a mountain of other LSTR units, saying, ‘you shouldn’t have returned.’

Adler is the face of madness, yet, unlike Elster, can embrace his madness. His diaries speak of memories he doesn’t have, and even before the disaster hits the facility he is obsessed with his commander, Falke. Notably, his face falls away at the halfway point in the game, as Elster attempts to return to the Penrose-512. His words, ‘I wear no mask’ are found in the book, the King In Yellow, 1895 novel by Robert W. Chambers.

This book is also found at the beginning of the game, before the title card plays. Immediately after this book is shown, the images of Elster losing her face flash on screen, with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Festival, also showing, “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice. And things have learned to walk that ought to crawl.” Both The King In Yellow and The Festival are important to recognize in relation to SIGNALIS.

The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories by Chambers, four of which are about a fictional play titled “The King in Yellow.” Reading, or watching this play in these stories often leads to the protagonists being driven mad. Both Chambers and Lovecraft are well known for writing cosmic horror, which is present in both short stories. For example, the quote, “I wear no mask,” is talking about a monster in the play. “Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!” —The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2. These stories talk about masks and true identities, corresponding to the themes of SIGNALIS, what with Elster being unable to unmask herself, her own desires, and the truth of what has happened to both herself and Serpinski. Adler, on the other hand, refuses to hide who he is, openly displaying both his contempt for Elster, as well as his strong desire to reunite with Falke and put an end to the vicious cycle.

Another major theme of SIGNALIS, working also as a horror element, is the idea of repetition, of cycles. One definition of insanity is, “doing the exact same thing over and over again, expecting the result to change.” That is what happens both gameplaywise, and story wise. Elster is caught in a sort of time loop, continuously arriving at Serpinski, fighting the same enemies over and over, confronting Adler, failing to reunite with her ship, the Penrose-512, and arriving at the facility again. This is again referenced with the fall down the elevator, showing a mountain of corpses of LSTR units who have previously attempted to find the hidden truth. Also, when Elster approaches the Penrose, dozens of LSTR corpses are seen in the red sand nearby, having succumbed to their injuries.

This is also the point in the game Elster fails to fulfill her promise, seemingly dying, with the credits rolling after her arm is torn off and her eyes lose their life

In relation to cycles, death is another key component of the game, since even on easier difficulties it is common for the player to die while fighting off multiple enemies in a cramped corridor, with little maneuverability and low ammunition. The player dies over and over, and even plays into the gameplay. SIGNALIS features multiple endings, and the number of times the player dies is a variable which helps determine which ending the player gets. The motif of death is also conveyed through a painting by Arnold Böcklin, Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead). This painting also flashes across the screen during the title introduction. What makes this painting more relevant is that the artist painted five different versions of the painting, relating once more to the idea of seeing the same thing, with just slightly different variations each time.

Image 28: Die Toteninsel, Basel version © 1880 Arnold Böcklin

At one point the player even explores a recreation of the island in-game.

A key element of the gameplay relates again to the theme of repetition. The player only has six slots to keep items, which necessitates many trips between objectives and a storeroom with a locker containing items such as weapons, ammunition, puzzle elements, and other items required to progress. This repetition again plays into the violence of the game. The player must repeatedly shoot, blow up, set alight, and use other violent methods to defeat enemies, only for them to begin walking and stalking again. “Madness would seem not merely to disrupt such sanctioned ideals but in fact to constitute the definitional “outside,” the external limit, of the “studies protocol” itself.” (Donegan, 4). Madness brings forth an idea of outside and inside, being locked inside one’s own mind, and indeed, the game begins once the player descends into a pit. Descent, the unravelling of reality, repeatedly. There is no end to the experience. That is how the game progresses, as well as Elster’s madness. And to an extent, the player’s madness as well.

SIGNALIS is a complicated game, filled with various twists and turns. Barely comprehensible journal entries fill the player’s diary, barely making a dent in their understanding of what is happening to them. Screams and sobs echo through the derelict facility, flickering lights cast over the shambling horrors. There is an inescapable feeling of dread in this game, and it portrays it perfectly. In fact, some could even call SIGNALIS a madness simulator.

Bibliography

Aho, Tanja, et al. “Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence.” American Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp. 291–302. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26360849. Accessed 22 Apr. 2024.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1262350/SIGNALIS

Full gameplay of SIGNALIS

https://www.sensesatlas.com/isle-of-the-dead-five-versions

Chambers, Robert W. The King In Yellow. F. Tennyson Neely. 1895

Lovecraft, H.P. The Festival. Weird Tales, Jan. 1925.

Author

Robert Sheeran

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